Zonal Architectures: Enabling the Full Promise of Software-Defined Vehicles
Sonatus and NXP collaborate to solve top architectural challenges on the road to safer, smarter, and more efficient vehicles. Sonatus is offering a software solution that allows its customers to accelerate the transition to software-defined vehicles.
Challenge
Zonal Architectures can revolutionize vehicles by allowing OEMs to decrease wiring harness weight and set the foundation for more scalable architectures required for full Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). However, the transition to zonal imposes significant new technological challenges. Unlike statically configured legacy architectures that physically isolate each domain to achieve performance, safety and security, zonal architectures feature multiple ethernet switches in a richly connected topology. What is more, the ethernet links between the switches may carry mixed criticality traffic from multiple domains or applications. This dynamic environment requires OEMs to adopt dynamic new technologies to manage it.
Solution
Sonatus Networking team collaborated with NXP to develop a holistic zonal architecture solution with a functioning demo. The solution employs modern, software-defined networking concepts to provision the network from a centralized network controller. The network controller is topology and service-aware and can be dynamically updated with lightweight policies deployed from the cloud to support diverse application traffic of mixed-criticality while meeting reliability and performance requirements essential for vehicle safety. It provisions the network to handle link outages and reconfigures the network dynamically.
Impact
The joint solution united hardware and software expertise to generate valuable learnings for both Sonatus and NXP on how to realize complicated architectures. Some of the notable outcomes included
1) Validating a solution that was capable to support a wide variety of application traffic including external vehicle traffic such as HTTP and MQTT, SOA (SOME/IP), Audio & Video, Diagnostics, and CAN-over-Ethernet, all with mixed levels of criticality.
2) Progress in creating a flexible and application-aware network that enables continuous updates of vehicle applications while ensuring critical vehicle functions. These learnings are a significant milestone in realizing zonal architectures.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere thanks to Brian Carlson ( Director, Global Product and Solutions Marketing at NXP) and Jeff Chou (CEO & Founder at Sonatus).
Contact for the project
Roberto Sampietro, Ventures Mobility
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